Deviation Leads to Aggravation

More Praise of the Internets

Another econ blog that I view on a daily basis is Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal. I don’t read it as throughly as others, but there’s usually a post every few days that I find interesting. DeLong teaches various economics courses at UC Berkley and worked in the Treasury Dept. during the early Clinton years where he worked on NAFTA, inter alia. He’s an extraordinarily bright and learned man with a quirky sense of humor that is perhaps better expressed through his writings than his speeches and lectures.

Yesterday I was perusing his blog and was interested to discover that he posted his lecture notes from the first day of an economics course he recently started teaching at UC. Even more interesting was that he posted an audio podcast of the entire lecture. Intrigued, I quickly prepared myself some supper and listened to the entire lecture as I dined on bread, cheese, and cold cuts. The lecture consisted mainly of typical first-day-of-class syllabus nonsense, but even that I enjoyed hearing (especially the inane and irrelevant questions posed by students that are evidently universal in university courses). I do not know if Prof. DeLong plans on posting an audio podcast for every lecture, but the implications if he does are worth pondering and will be the subject of a future post.

For now I will merely again sing the praises of the internets which allow me to attend university lectures with nary but the cost of my time.